It so happened that history forever linked the name of Graysmith with the soul-cooling crimes of a serial killer, nicknamed the Zodiac. Of course, this is no coincidence: we can say that because of the criminal, the former cartoonist became a writer. For more than twenty years, he has reworked a ton of material to get closer to revealing the identity of this cruel person. And since the Zodiac case is one of the most mysterious crimes not disclosed by the US police , Robert Graysmith, who devoted ten years of his life to studying the facts in this case, decided to write about it.
The first book "Zodiac" was released in 1986 and became a national bestseller. Inspired by success, the author wrote several more detective novels, but not all of them were clearly well received by critics.
In 2007, the book "Zodiac" was filmed. The director of the film of the same name was David Fincher.
Unsolved crimes
In the late sixties, San Francisco and California aroused a series of brutal murders committed by a criminal using the pseudonym Zodiac. At that time, Robert Graysmith was a cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle. A distinctive feature of the killer was encrypted letters, which he sent to the publishers of local newspapers after the crimes committed. In them, the Zodiac reported information about himself and the motives of the killings, and the best cryptographers worked on these texts. Graysmith was also carried away by unraveling the coded crimes of the Zodiac, believing that the police were not doing enough.
There were a lot of suspects, but evidence and evidence was not enough to find the true criminal. The hunt for the killer began by detectives-amateurs, among whom was the political cartoonist Robert Graysmith. The police claimed five murders and two attempts, committed by a maniac, when the Zodiac himself in his messages claimed that at least 37 people died from his hand. In any case, despite all the efforts of the police and private investigators, the identity of the killer was never disclosed. And this criminal case to this day is a painful topic for US law enforcement.
Life's work
When the first references to the maniac terrorizing northern California appeared in the press, the successful cartoonist Robert Graysmith, who at that time was 25 years old, did not think about changing his activities. But when it became clear that the police had reached an impasse with the investigation, Graysmith, like many others, decided to join in the case of the capture of the killer. He was so immersed in the investigation that he lost interest in his usual life.
For days, Robert sat over encrypted messages published in newspapers, draped around the thresholds of police stations in the hope of receiving at least some information, and such an obsession affected Greysmith's personal life: his marriage cracked at the seams. Later, in an interview with one of the television channels, the writer said that such a serious investigation into the crimes of the Zodiac was prompted by sluggish police activity in this case. Everything was hushed up even within departments, not to mention different jurisdictions. And then Robert decided to start the investigation as a private person: he spoke with the survivors, compared the facts and collected all the details missed by the police. Remembering his conversations with the police, Robert Graysmith said: “The zodiac is the criminal who craves fame, and he will certainly appear as an interested person who wants to help the investigation.”
The main suspect
Graysmith’s words were not taken seriously, however, in 1971, someone Arthur Lee Allen, a convicted child molester, came into the view of law enforcement officers. His friend told the police that the intent of committing Allen’s crimes was similar to the Zodiac’s motives, in addition, Arthur somehow admitted that he was annoyed by young people who retire for dates. Police knew that the Zodiac basically attacked and shot such couples.
In a subsequent investigation, the San Francisco and Vallejo police searched Allen’s trailer, but investigators were unable to find any evidence linking Allen to the Zodiac’s crimes. Despite the fact that the fingerprints of the killer and samples of his sweat from the handset fell into the hands of the police, the DNA examination was then imperfect, and nothing was proved.
The Zodiac, Robert Graysmith: A Summary of the Book
Studying the crimes of the Zodiac took ten years of Graysmith's life. He decided that people have the right to know the truth about this case. So in 1986 the book "Zodiac" appeared. It was submitted in the form of documentary notes and tells about all the difficulties that the police and the author had to face in trying to find the killer. The reader will be interested in the ending of the book, and looking ahead, it must be said that the author expressed his opinion as follows the author Robert Graysmith: "The zodiac was still identified, but punished not by earthly, but by heavenly justice." The work in the form of a journalistic investigation presents all the facts, including the letters of the Zodiac, and the conclusions reached by the investigation, and also puts forward its own point of view on what is happening. And although critics condemned the author and denied the authenticity of the texts of some letters of the murderer, the audience enthusiastically accepted the book.
Robert Graysmith, Zodiac: reviews
According to readers, Graysmith's work certainly deserves attention with the caveat that this literature is not for the faint of heart. Accuracy, realism and restraint of the presentation of facts, similar to the dry language of filling the graph of a criminal case, are noted. Readers also express their regret at the lack of a Russian translation of the author’s second book on the Zodiac case, in which the writer expresses his assumptions about this case.